• Busha Business has partnered with Tether to expand regulated stablecoin infrastructure for African businesses.
• The collaboration focuses on enterprise payments, treasury management, and cross-border settlements rather than retail crypto trading.
• The announcement reflects a broader shift across Africa, where fintechs are increasingly positioning stablecoins as financial infrastructure instead of speculative assets.

Busha Business, the B2B infrastructure arm of Nigerian crypto exchange Busha, has announced a partnership with Tether, issuer of USD₮. The focus of the partnership is to expand licensed stablecoin infrastructure for African businesses.

Busha and Tether Deepen Stablecoin Partnership

Busha Business, which operates in Nigeria and Kenya, is built on Busha’s SEC-licensed foundation. It offers cross-border payments, stablecoin treasury management, business savings, merchant payment tools, and API infrastructure for other fintechs and developers. The Tether partnership expands on that by giving Busha Business clients access to globally connected USD₮ liquidity.

Busha co-founder and COO Moyo Sodipo framed the announcement around speed and infrastructure rather than crypto novelty, saying “businesses need financial infrastructure that moves at the speed of modern commerce.”

He also highlighted the opportunities this opens for businesses.

Through our collaboration with Tether, we are giving businesses access to globally connected liquidity on licensed infrastructure designed for faster payments, stronger treasury management, and more efficient international trade.

A move, he claims, is “another step toward building the financial rails that African businesses need to compete globally.”

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino also pointed to the persistent cost and slowness of cross-border transactions in emerging markets as the problem the partnership is meant to close.

“Cross-border transactions are still slow and expensive for the businesses and individuals who depend on them, especially in emerging markets, and closing that gap requires collaboration between companies committed to solving it,” he said.

This announcement comes a few months after the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi, where Busha’s COO, Moyo Sodipo, called for more African-relevant stablecoin infrastructure to reduce reliance on payment systems built for other markets.

The Africa Tech Summit appearance was shortly followed by an exclusive mixer called “After The Summit” hosted by Busha in partnership with Tether.

Africa’s Stablecoin Race Is Moving Up the Stack

Over the past two years, Africa’s crypto companies have largely stopped competing as exchanges and started competing to become financial infrastructure providers.

Flutterwave integrated USDC settlement through its Circle partnership. Yellow Card has pivoted hard toward institutional infrastructure, adding Visa and Mastercard as platform partners. Opera’s MiniPay has pushed stablecoins into everyday consumer payments. Visa has built out its own stablecoin platform and pilots across the continent.

In May 2026, Busha itself launched a crypto-backed payment card that enables its retail users to spend stablecoins and other digital assets straight from their wallets.

Busha’s move with Tether fits squarely into that pattern.

Why Tether Is Increasingly Focusing on Africa

Stablecoin usage in Africa has grown. Yellow Card reported that stablecoins accounted for 43% of total cryptocurrency transaction volume in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024. Nigeria, one of the markets where Busha Business operates, accounts for 60% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s stablecoin inflow since 2019. It also recorded an estimated $22 billion in transactions between July 2023 and June 2024.

USDT, Tether’s stablecoin, dominates this large stablecoin market. With 59% of its crypto users holding USDT, Nigeria leads the world in USDT ownership. USDT also dominates roughly 60% of P2P trading volume in sub-Saharan Africa. This translates to roughly $3.6 billion in monthly transactions across Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa alone.

This large market share exists because Africa offers Tether a structurally favourable environment for USDT’s business case. Expensive cross-border payment costs, high currency volatility, and chronic dollar-access shortages are all problems on the continent that its stablecoin can address. The continent’s fast-growing base of B2B trade increasingly prefers dollar-denominated settlement that occurs without the hassle of correspondent banking.

USDT has held its lead in international settlement volume largely on liquidity depth and first-mover distribution. It’s the stablecoin most exchanges, OTC desks, and payment corridors already support. USDC and newer entrants like Open USD compete for the same institutional customers on regulatory clarity and banking-grade compliance features.

What This Means for African Businesses

For SMEs, the practical upside is improved trade. Faster and cheaper settlement with stablecoins means faster supplier payments, fewer banking delays, and lower remittance costs. It also reduces the barrier to entry and makes it easier to participate in markets that used to require a dollar account they couldn’t easily open.

For banks and fintechs, partnerships like this raise the competitive stakes. With global institutions like Visa integrating and developing stablecoin infrastructure, there’s a chance that institutions that don’t follow suit risk losing corporate payment flows to companies that do.

For regulators, growing enterprise stablecoin usage is likely to shift the conversation further toward licensing frameworks, AML compliance, treasury reporting standards, and institutional custody rules.

Africa’s Financial Infrastructure Is Becoming Blockchain-Native

None of these point toward stablecoins replacing banks. They point toward stablecoin rails being layered underneath the financial services Africa’s businesses already use. It shows how they’re quietly handling the settlement leg that used to take days and cost a meaningful percentage of the transaction.

Busha’s partnership with Tether is one more data point in that shift. Crypto firms are repositioning themselves as payment infrastructure providers rather than exchanges.

The companies that come out ahead over the next few years are unlikely to be the ones with the most trading volume. They’ll be the ones that become quietly indispensable to how African commerce actually moves money.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on July 21, 2026.

Busha Partners with Tether to Make Cross-Border Business Payments Cheaper and Faster was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Scrypt has expanded its licensed stablecoin settlement infrastructure into Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda.
• Businesses can now convert local currencies directly into stablecoins without first sourcing US dollars.
• The move reflects a broader shift toward stablecoins becoming enterprise payment infrastructure rather than speculative crypto assets.

Doing business across African borders has long been defined by a frustrating paradox. To send money to a neighbour, you almost always have to route it through an ocean. Historically, a business trying to settle an invoice across East African borders had to convert local currency to US dollars, route it through European or US banks, and then convert it back to the destination local currency. That process was expensive and inefficient.

SCRYPT, a Swiss-licensed digital asset infrastructure provider, is directly targeting this inefficiency. The company announced the expansion of its stablecoin settlement rails into four core East African markets. The markets are Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda.

Through this expansion, SCRYPT’s institutional clients can now settle transactions between local currencies in these markets and stablecoins in real time. The network directly supports the Kenyan Shilling, the Tanzanian Shilling, the Rwandan Franc, and the Ugandan Shilling.

SCRYPT’s FINMA-regulated corridors offer businesses a compliant local-currency-to-stablecoin flow.

The Core Problem: Navigating the USD Liquidity Squeeze

One recurring pain point for businesses in Africa is structural liquidity. US dollar shortages are a persistent challenge in emerging markets. Central banks, striving to preserve foreign exchange reserves, frequently ration access to the dollar.

When an East African importer needs to pay a global supplier, they cannot simply wire their local currency. As of 2017, only 20% of all cross-border commercial payments sent by African banks remained within the continent.

It often requires converting local fiat to scarce US dollars or Euros. Those funds move through sluggish correspondent banking systems before finally getting to the recipient. Banks in North America, mainly the US, received 39.5% of all payments sent by Africa in 2017. More than 80% of the transactions sent from Africa to the United States had their final beneficiary in another region. One of the two main regions where the payment was eventually made was Africa.

Scrypt Aims to Simplify the Process

This path is slow, often taking three to five business days, and expensive. Africa is the most expensive continent to send money to and within. Cross-border transactions through traditional channels can cost between 7% and 20% of the transaction value. Sending 200 dollars to East Africa, where SCRYPT has recently expanded, costs an average of 9.9%.

This cost, driven by foreign exchange spreads of 3% to 8% applied by banks and payment intermediaries, and correspondent banking fees of USD 15–50 per transaction at each intermediary hop, often heavily impacts businesses’ profit margins.

The World Bank estimates that cheaper cross-border payments could improve trade and generate USD 292 billion in income gains for Africa.

SCRYPT’s stablecoin settlement rails simplify this trajectory into a streamlined, single-step corridor. Local currency is converted directly into stablecoins such as USDC or USDT.

This removes the intermediate US dollar conversion step, thereby reducing costs and settlement times and taking operational pressure off local treasury teams.

From Speculative Asset to Treasury Tool

The true narrative of this expansion is about the maturation of blockchain technology into enterprise financial plumbing.

Stablecoin adoption in Africa is on the rise. Initially driven by speculative trading, stablecoins found a use case as a hedge against currency volatility in many African countries by the early 2020s. Nigeria, the continent’s largest market, accounts for an estimated 60% of all stablecoin inflows.

Today, stablecoins have moved from primarily being used for trading in Africa to being critical tools for treasury management and the movement of working capital.

Africa as a Stablecoin Laboratory

SCRYPT’s expansion aligns with a broader trend across the continent. African fintech infrastructure is actively being rebuilt around stablecoin rails.

Ripple has invested in Flutterwave to accelerate RLUSD-powered settlement. Circle Ventures has separately backed Flutterwave’s USDC strategy. Visa, M-PESA, and Onafriq have piloted stablecoin-based payments in the DRC. AEON has expanded crypto payments into Zambia. Polygon has formed partnerships focused on stablecoin payments in Africa. HyperFX has used cNGN and other stablecoins for instant FX settlement.

Almost every major infrastructure announcement in African fintech recently has centred around stablecoin-powered payments.

Why East Africa is the Perfect Sandbox

The East African Community is a powerhouse of intra-regional trade. It is characterised by a highly entrepreneurial SME sector and a robust mobile money penetration across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania.

In 2025, East Africa had an estimated 537 million registered mobile money accounts. Mobile money transaction value grew 23% to $806 billion over 61 billion transactions, the largest in the continent. Businesses in this corridor are uniquely positioned to adopt digital ledger technology.

However, trading smoothly with global counterparties in Europe, the Gulf, and Asia has always been limited by the availability of foreign exchange. Placing regulated stablecoin settlement atop these highly digitised economies is what SCRYPT plans to do.

There is some progress with regulation in East Africa, although it remains uneven. Kenya has moved the furthest in the region in terms of regulations, enacting its VASP Act in 2025. Tanzania and Rwanda are currently developing their own regulatory guidelines.

What This Means for the Future of African Fintech

SCRYPT’s East African corridors hint at three major shifts for the regional payment ecosystem.

First, the battle is moving entirely to infrastructure. The real battle is happening at the structural settlement layer. Companies are now competing to own the most compliant, high-throughput rails that connect local businesses to international networks.

Second, banks could become silent consumers of this technology. Rather than viewing digital assets as a threat to their business model, progressive African banks can take a leaf out of the books of global payment icons like Mastercard and Visa to leverage stablecoins behind the scenes. By using B2B settlement corridors, banks can optimize their internal liquidity and manage foreign exchange risk exposure. They could also offer faster international transfers to their enterprise clients without locking up large reserves in correspondent accounts.

Third, stablecoins are becoming invisible. In the near future, the average consumer may not even realise they are using blockchain technology. To them, the process will simply feel like a local currency transfer. It’ll settle in minutes rather than days, and users will get a transparent conversion rate and drastically lower fees.

SCRYPT’S corridors and other similar developments don’t completely eliminate FX or regulatory friction. They do not completely replace banks, but they are promising solutions and alternatives. For SCRYPT, measurable adoption data, rather than the announcement itself, will be the real test of how much friction it actually removes.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on July 17, 2026.

Scrypt Expands Stablecoin Settlement Rails Across Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• ForgeLayer has replaced its fixed monthly subscription with a pay-as-you-go pricing model after receiving customer feedback.
• The company says businesses were hesitant to commit to recurring fees before proving the product’s value.
• The change reflects a broader trend in B2B fintech, where reducing adoption friction can be more important than maximising short-term revenue.
• The move raises an interesting question: should more African crypto infrastructure startups adopt usage-based pricing?

ForgeLayer announced that it’s taking customer feedback and offering a pay-as-you-go alternative to its previous subscription model. One must consider the cost implications for the industry and not just its customers, and the potential ripple effects.

ForgeLayer provides non-custodial crypto payment infrastructure for businesses looking to integrate crypto products without spending time and resources building blockchain infrastructure from scratch.

ForgeLayer Is Rethinking How Crypto Infrastructure Is Sold

The new model charges a flat 0.3% per successful transaction, rather than the flat recurring monthly charge businesses would incur regardless of the volume processed. Companies that process sufficient volume and aren’t as concerned about cost can still opt to pay for the subscription plan, which removes per-transaction fees.

ForgeLayer’s infrastructure provides plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart, PHP, React, and Node JS to accelerate dev adoption.

For smaller businesses, this new pricing system reduces the barrier to entry and allows them to try out this new product without committing a large amount. According to the community manager for ForgeLayer, Lilian Jessica,

Customers were saying they wanted to implement our platform, but having to pay without any guarantee that they’d make that amount back in a month was difficult. We went back to the drawing board and looked at our mission, which is making it easier for businesses that want to go global.

Pricing is Part of Product-Market Fit

Infrastructure product providers, especially in Africa, must consider this: if you want your business to scale, you must understand your customers’ pain points. If this customer base consists of African businesses and startups, you should ideally be aware of and ready to accommodate their cost-related challenges.

Infrastructure products compete on more than technical features. They compete on API pricing, onboarding friction, implementation time, and developer experience. Your API could be great, but adoption will still stall if businesses have to pay high fees to see any value.

In that sense, pricing is not separate from the product because it shapes who is willing to try it and determines how quickly they can.

Why Pay-as-You-Go Makes Sense for African Businesses

In the first quarter of 2026, companies in the USA and Canada secured over $250 billion in funding. In comparison, African startups raised $705 million in the same time period. The general idea most people have about tech companies, regardless of industry, is that if the idea and your plan are good, the funding will come. African entrepreneurs know this is not always true.

Many small and medium enterprises across Africa operate with limited cash flow. What some might consider too cautious or frugal is standard practice. When you secure funding, you need to use it diligently. When you spend, the spending must be justified.

A Usage-Based Model Aligns Costs with Business Growth

African businesses need the option of experimenting with the product before making any long-term commitments. Offering usage-based billing ties what a business pays to what it earns, making the cost easier to justify.

If a merchant processes zero crypto transactions, then they do not have to pay. This is especially ideal for African fintechs, online businesses, and SaaS platforms that are testing crypto for the first time.

Stablecoin adoption across the continent is on the rise, with Sub-Saharan Africa leading the world and the region at a 9.3% adoption rate. Stablecoins accounted for 43% of total cryptocurrency transaction volume in the region in 2024, with strong use for retail and cross-border payments. Businesses will want to tap into this. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that crypto payments will take off for any business. However, this model lowers the cost of finding out.

Could Other African Crypto Infrastructure Companies Follow?

Reducing adoption friction has become a major competitive advantage in fintech. Other crypto infrastructure firms in Africa could increase their adoption rate by offering usage-based models. Whether you’re offering stablecoin payment APIs, wallet infrastructure, or compliance tools, this is worth considering.

Yellow Card recently discontinued their retail arm and has spent time repositioning itself around B2B and institutional clients. Its widespread regulatory credibility is its competitive advantage. Opera’s Mini Pay has embedded a stablecoin wallet directly into a browser that millions of Africans already use, stripping out friction.

Across the continent, Fintechs are exploring ways to reduce the hurdles to adoption for their clients. Flutterwave has spent its year improving and deepening its stablecoin integration. Paga, via partnerships with SUI and TBook, has also explored stablecoin accounts and tokenized assets this year.

While the mechanisms for reducing adoption across these businesses have differed from ForgeLayer’s pricing change, the instinct is similar. The point is not for other crypto infrastructure providers to unthinkingly copy ForgeLayer. The goal, however, is to recognize the various pain points and barriers that could delay integration and to work with that in mind.

Reducing friction is a competitive axis for African crypto infrastructure.

African Infrastructure Companies are Selling Trust, Not Just Technology

In the African market, earning trust is just as important as building the right product. It doesn’t matter if the product is B2B or B2C; you need to build trust. How do you get businesses to trust you in a market typically considered “low trust?”

For most businesses, choosing an infrastructure provider is a big deal. That infrastructure will be part of your business’s foundation. You need to ask yourself certain questions about reliability and about cost. Will this provider be here in two or three years? Is the service they are offering me worth the money? Will the eventual transaction volume justify the cost?

All these questions can be condensed into one question. Is it worth it?

Companies like Lazerpay, a Nigerian crypto payments startup once pitched as the “Stripe for crypto,” shut down in 2023 after failing to raise much-needed funding. Lazerpay is an example that crypto infrastructure on the continent has a genuine mortality rate.

Usage-based billing reduces perceived risk for cautious executives. If the provider’s earnings are tied to the merchant’s earnings, it increases trust. Businesses are more inclined to believe you will do right by them, as your success is intertwined with theirs. In a market with so many uncertainties, commercial empathy and lower financial friction could ultimately create higher long-term adoption.

Lessons Crypto Infrastructure Could Learn From Saas And Cloud Computing

Traditional technology giants popularised consumption-based billing long ago. Amazon Web Services, Twilio, and Stripe built empires using this framework. OpenAI also prices its AI models based on direct usage.

​These companies rarely demanded massive upfront financial commitments from early adopters. Instead, customers paid per API call or per transaction. They paid per compute hour or per message sent. Crypto infrastructure is moving in this same direction globally. ForgeLayer is adapting a proven software model to African digital finance.

As blockchain tools become commoditized, technical features look identical. Providers must find new ways to stand out in a crowded market. Business model innovation is becoming the new frontier for enterprise software.

​Why This Matters

​The pricing change might look like a minor product update. However, it reflects a major shift in how crypto platforms acquire users. Technical innovation alone is no longer enough to win the market.

​As competition intensifies, providers will differentiate through their commercial models. Onboarding experiences and customer success will dictate who wins the continent. Financial tools must adapt to the economic realities of local businesses.

​Companies that make experimenting with stablecoins cheap will drive mainstream adoption. They allow traditional Web2 firms to test Web3 tools safely. By removing fixed overheads, ForgeLayer changes the risk equation for African commerce. The future of regional crypto infrastructure depends heavily on lowering the cost of discovery.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on July 9, 2026.

Why ForgeLayer’s Pay-as-You-Go Model Could Accelerate Crypto Infrastructure Adoption in Africa was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Five years ago, stablecoins were still easy to dismiss. They looked like a niche product for traders, a bridge asset for crypto markets, or a temporary workaround for a financial system that was still deciding what digital money should look like.

That framing no longer works.

Today, stablecoins sit at the intersection of payments, settlement, regulation, and monetary power. They are no longer just a crypto instrument. They are becoming part of the financial infrastructure that moves value across borders, between institutions, and increasingly between business models.

And if you look at the market honestly, one conclusion stands out: the United States pulled ahead because it allowed dollar stablecoins to become the default digital money layer. Europe, meanwhile, built a stronger rulebook than many expected, but has not yet translated that into market scale.

That gap matters far beyond crypto.

It matters for fintech. It matters for banks. It matters for payment providers. It matters for policymakers.

And it matters for anyone who still believes that monetary influence in the digital economy is going to be shared evenly by default.

A five-year shift

Stablecoins have grown from a specialist tool into a major digital liquidity layer.

ECB analysis places stablecoin market capitalisation at roughly $300 billion in early 2026. That number alone tells part of the story. The more important part is how quickly stablecoins have moved from the margins of crypto into the architecture of digital finance.

But the real divide is not the size of the market. It is the currency that dominates it.

According to ECB analysis, more than 99.7% of stablecoins are USD-denominated. Euro-denominated stablecoins remain in the low hundreds of millions of euros. That is not a minor imbalance. It is a structural outcome.

It means that when the market needed a digital settlement asset, it chose the dollar.

That choice has consequences.

The US: digital dollar dominance by market design

The United States did not need to announce a grand strategy to win the stablecoin market. In practice, it allowed one to emerge.

The result is a digital dollar ecosystem that now sits inside crypto trading, cross-border transfers, wallets, treasury flows, and emerging fintech products. Stablecoins have become a programmable extension of dollar liquidity.

That gives the US three advantages.

First, it extends the reach of the dollar into digital markets. A stablecoin can move quickly, settle quickly, and function across time zones in a way that legacy rails still struggle to match.

Second, it reinforces demand for dollar-linked reserve assets. Stablecoin issuers hold backing assets, and those reserves tend to support the centrality of US safe assets in the digital economy.

Third, it creates network effects. Once businesses, traders, and platforms standardise on dollar stablecoins, the system begins to reinforce itself. Liquidity attracts liquidity. Trust attracts adoption. Adoption attracts infrastructure.

This is why the stablecoin story is bigger than crypto.

The ECB has warned that USD stablecoins can amplify the international transmission of US monetary policy. Put more plainly, the dollar is gaining another distribution channel.

That is a strategic gain for the US. Whether it intended to or not, it now has a digital version of dollar dominance that reaches far beyond traditional banking rails.

The UK: pragmatic, not passive

The UK has taken a more practical approach than many in Europe.

The Bank of England has moved toward a framework for systemic stablecoins that tries to balance innovation with financial stability. That matters because it shows a willingness to treat stablecoins as part of the payments system rather than as a purely speculative object.

For fintech and payments leaders, that distinction is critical.

A market can debate stablecoins endlessly, or it can build a usable regime around them. The UK appears to be choosing the second path.

The commercial significance is not that the UK has solved every issue. It has not. The significance is that it has created a path where regulated stablecoin models may actually get to scale.

That is where the UK becomes interesting: not as a winner-takes-all market, but as a bridge between traditional finance and digital finance.

Switzerland: testing before scaling

Switzerland is following a different logic.

Rather than trying to dominate immediately, it is using controlled experimentation.

The CHF stablecoin sandbox involving six banks and Swiss Stablecoin AG is important because it shows that stablecoins are no longer only a crypto-native idea. Banks are willing to test them too, provided the structure is credible and the use case is clear.

That makes Switzerland a serious laboratory for regulated digital money.

Its strength is not scale. Its strength is institutional trust.

That combination matters because the future of stablecoins will not be determined only by the loudest crypto projects. It will also be shaped by whether banks, regulators, and infrastructure providers can agree on models that are both technically useful and politically acceptable.

Switzerland is testing that proposition in a measured way.

Europe: a strong rulebook, but not yet enough market power

Europe deserves real credit for MiCA.

In a market that often moves faster than policy can follow, Europe built one of the most comprehensive digital asset frameworks in the world. That is a genuine achievement.

But regulation is not the same as market leadership.

That is where the stablecoin conversation becomes uncomfortable for Europe.

The ECB has remained cautious on euro stablecoins, and the market has responded accordingly. Euro-denominated stablecoins remain tiny compared with USD stablecoins. The implication is hard to avoid: Europe may have the better rulebook, but it does not yet have the same economic gravity.

This is not a failure of talent or technology. Europe has both.

It is a failure of conversion.

The policy foundation exists. The market size does not.

And in financial infrastructure, that matters more than many people want to admit.

If the euro does not secure a meaningful role in stablecoin issuance and usage, then Europe risks becoming a region that regulates a market whose default operating layer is still defined elsewhere.

That is a subtle form of dependence. It is also a strategic one.

Qivalis and the case for more European action

Qivalis is a useful sign that Europe has not given up on scale.

The bank-led consortium has grown to 37 financial institutions across 15 countries. That is not a symbolic number. It shows that major European institutions understand the issue and are trying to respond.

That is exactly why projects like Qivalis matter.

Europe does not need more commentary about stablecoins. It needs more attempts to build them in a compliant, bank-grade, euro-native way.

If the ECB and the European Commission want to strengthen Europe’s position, this is the kind of initiative they should encourage. The market will not be rebuilt by regulation alone. It will be rebuilt by regulation plus execution.

That is the missing combination.

What this means for payments

For payments, stablecoins are becoming a direct challenge to friction.

They can move value quickly. They can operate across borders. They can be programmed into workflows in ways legacy payment systems were not designed to handle.

That is why payment companies, fintechs, and enterprise treasury teams are watching this market closely.

The question is no longer whether stablecoins can move money. They can.

The question is whether they can become the preferred settlement layer for more of the global economy.

Right now, USD stablecoins have the lead.

They have more liquidity, more usage, and more network effect.

Europe’s challenge is that payment systems are not won by legal clarity alone. They are won by usability, interoperability, and scale.

What this means for settlement

Settlement is where the institutional case for stablecoins becomes strongest.

If value can settle faster and with fewer intermediaries, the economics of finance begin to change. That is why banks, market infrastructure firms, and regulated fintechs are paying attention.

The UK and Switzerland are both showing that institutional stablecoin models can be tested in regulated environments. Europe, through MiCA and through projects like Qivalis, has the ingredients to do the same.

But testing is not the same as winning.

Scale still decides whether a pilot becomes a standard.

What this means for monetary power

This is where the stablecoin story becomes strategic.

If the dominant stablecoin remains dollar-based, the US does not just dominate a product category. It strengthens the reach of its currency inside the digital economy.

That is not theoretical. It is already happening.

The ECB has acknowledged the risk that USD stablecoins could amplify the international transmission of US monetary policy. That should be read as a signal, not a footnote.

Europe’s challenge is therefore not only commercial. It is monetary.

If the euro does not matter inside stablecoin infrastructure, then Europe’s currency influence in the digital economy will remain weaker than its regulatory ambition.

That is an uncomfortable trade-off.

Being the strictest market is not the same as being the most influential one.

What this means for geopolitics

Stablecoins may look technical, but they are becoming part of economic statecraft.

A dollar stablecoin ecosystem expands the digital footprint of the US. A weak euro stablecoin ecosystem limits Europe’s ability to project financial influence in a tokenised, always-on global market.

That is why this debate matters outside crypto.

It matters to central banks.

It matters to finance ministries.

It matters to payment companies.

It matters to banks trying to modernise.

And it matters to any founder building in regulated digital finance.

If digital money becomes infrastructure, then the currency that dominates digital money becomes strategically important.

At the moment, that currency is still overwhelmingly the dollar.

Europe is not out of the race

Europe should not be written off.

It has MiCA. It has capable institutions. It has the credibility to lead on trust. It has bank groups willing to test the model. It has projects like Qivalis that show market intent.

What it does not yet have is enough scale.

That is why the next phase matters so much.

Europe can still catch up if it moves quickly enough and if it accepts that good regulation is only the starting point.

The real test is whether policy strength can be converted into market strength.

If it can, Europe still has a path.

If it cannot, then the stablecoin gap will become harder to close with every year that passes.

And by then, the market will already have chosen its default rails.

The question Europe should ask now

The question is not whether stablecoins matter.

They already do.

The question is whether Europe wants to remain a rule-maker in a market whose operating layer is set elsewhere or whether it wants to build enough scale to shape that layer itself.

That is the real stablecoin gap.

And it is still open.

About the Author

Joseph Zammit is a CMO and CSO in fintech and crypto, with 25+ years at the intersection of marketing, strategy, and regulation. He helped design Malta’s pioneering DLT framework, launched the country’s first Neobank, and led the global expansion of crypto and Web3 platforms, turning complex regulatory and market conditions into clear go‑to‑market decisions. He is a member of the Crypto Valley Association.

The Stablecoin Gap: Why the US Pulled Ahead, and Europe Is Still Catching Up was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stablecoin yield is safe only when you can name who is paying you and verify it. Else, it’s a reckless bet.

In November 2025, a stablecoin called xUSD that had been quietly paying double-digit yield fell from a dollar to about 26 cents in a single day after its operator disclosed a $93 million loss from one outside fund manager. The yield looked fine until the money behind it was gone.

So yeah, stablecoins and the yield on it is not risk-free, and no honest source will tell you otherwise.

The risk runs from modest to severe depending on where the yield comes from, whether the code has been audited and tested, whether you keep custody of your funds, and how the rate is set.

More than $300 billion now sits in stablecoins (DefiLlama, mid-2026), and most of it earns its holder nothing, so earning on those dollars safely is worth getting right.

Below are the five checks to run first, the red flags that should stop you, and one option, sUSDS, run honestly through the same list.

Is earning yield on stablecoins safe?

Earning yield on stablecoins is not risk-free, but the risk varies widely and you can check for it before you commit a dollar.

Safety depends on four things: where the yield actually comes from, whether the smart-contract code has survived real use, whether you keep control of your funds, and how the rate is governed.

A yield from tokenized US Treasuries and a yield from a leveraged DeFi loop both quote a dollar return, and they carry very different risk underneath.

Here is the part most explainers skip. Since the GENIUS Act became US law in July 2025, a payment stablecoin issuer is barred from paying you interest simply for holding the coin, a point the Richmond Fed lays out plainly.

The dollar in your wallet pays nothing on its own.

Every cent of yield comes from a separate engine that puts that dollar to work, and that engine is the thing you are actually trusting when you earn.

What are the main risks of earning yield on stablecoins?

The main risks of earning yield on stablecoins are yield-source risk, smart-contract risk, custody and counterparty risk, rate volatility, and a depeg in the underlying coin.

These belong to the earning activity, separate from whether the coin holds its dollar; for the asset side, the companion piece on whether stablecoins are safe to hold covers backing and depeg history in depth.

The five risks, in plain terms:

• Yield-source risk: the income can dry up if it was paid from token emissions or a single fragile strategy rather than real revenue. The Stream Finance xUSD failure spread roughly $285 million in linked debt across other lending protocols once its one strategy broke.
• Smart-contract risk: the code can be exploited or fail, and onchain yield always carries it.
• Custody and counterparty risk: if a platform holds your coins, its failure becomes your problem. When Celsius went bankrupt in 2022, a court ruled that assets in its interest accounts belonged to the estate, not to customers.
• Rate volatility: a variable rate can fall as fast as it rose, so today’s number is not next month’s.
• Peg risk: the stablecoin underneath can trade below a dollar, as USDC briefly did during the 2023 banking scare tied to Silicon Valley Bank.

What to check before you earn yield on stablecoins

Before you earn yield on stablecoins, run five checks: the yield source, the audit and track record, custody, rate behavior, and the backing.

Each one targets a different way the position can go wrong, and any platform worth your money should pass all five.

1. Where does the yield come from?
2. Is the code audited and time-tested?
3. Do you keep custody of your funds?
4. Is the rate predictable or volatile?
5. What backs it, and can you verify it?

Where does the yield come from?

Yield paid from real revenue, meaning lending fees, income from tokenized Treasuries, or protocol revenue, is more durable than yield paid in freshly minted incentive tokens.

For the full breakdown of durable versus subsidized sources, see where stablecoin yield actually comes from. If you cannot name the source in one sentence, find it before you trust it.

Is the code audited and time-tested?

All onchain yield carries smart-contract risk, so you lower it by checking for audits, years in production, and a clean exploit record.

Newer or unaudited contracts have simply had fewer chances to fail in public. A protocol that publishes its own user-risk documentation is showing you the failure modes rather than hiding them.

Do you keep custody of your funds?

Check whether you hold the asset yourself or hand it to a platform that holds it for you. Non-custodial means the asset stays in your wallet and no company can freeze it or lose it in a bankruptcy.

The 2022 collapses of Celsius, BlockFi, and Voyager all turned the same way: depositors who had handed over their coins became unsecured creditors waiting in line.

Custody is the risk most people never price until the withdrawal button stops working.

Is the rate predictable or volatile?

Check how the rate is set, because the mechanism tells you how it will behave. A governance-set rate that moves in deliberate steps is more predictable than one that spikes and crashes with borrowing demand or a promotional budget.

The main models on offer in mid-2026, with current ranges that are variable and worth verifying live:

• Utilization-based DeFi lending (Aave, Compound, Morpho): supply USDC or USDT and earn a rate driven by borrower demand, recently in the low single digits and moving the moment demand shifts.
• Custodial exchange rewards (Coinbase USDC rewards around 4.35% to 4.7%): simpler to use, gated behind a paid tier, and your coins sit on the platform’s balance sheet.
• Custodial high-yield accounts (Nexo advertising up to roughly 9.5%): the higher number is real, and so is the trade. Nexo paid a $45 million settlement to the SEC and state regulators in 2023 over its unregistered earn product and pulled it from US users.
• Governance-set protocol rate (the Sky Savings Rate behind sUSDS): set by onchain vote from protocol revenue, non-custodial, with the live figure published at financial.skyeco.com.

The higher number is real, and if you want it, it is there. The question is whether you are taking a view on the funding cycle and the platform holding your coins, or choosing a diversified, governance-set rate you can verify yourself.

What backs it, and can you verify it?

Check what stands behind the yield and whether you can inspect it. Diversified, overcollateralized backing you can see onchain is lower-risk than opaque or single-strategy exposure, because no single failure takes the whole thing down and you are not trusting a statement on faith.

If the only proof on offer is a quarterly attestation, that is your answer.

A worked example: checking sUSDS against the list

sUSDS is the yield-bearing form of USDS, and running it through the five checks shows what passing looks like.

The yield is the Sky Savings Rate, funded by Sky Protocol revenue across diversified sources rather than token emissions. The code traces its lineage to MakerDAO, one of DeFi’s longest-running systems, whose core stablecoin contracts have operated without an exploit.

You hold sUSDS non-custodially and can redeem it for USDS at any time, the rate is governance-set and published live, and the collateral is verifiable onchain rather than in a statement.

On the numbers, Sky Protocol reported record gross protocol revenue of $123.79 million and about $11.7 billion in USDS supply for the first quarter of 2026, which is the kind of real-revenue base the first check is asking for. USDS itself is overcollateralized and backed by a mix of crypto, USDC reserves, and tokenized US Treasuries.

Now the scar, because the favorable parts only mean something next to the honest ones. Smart-contract risk always applies. USDS is soft-pegged and can trade slightly off a dollar. And in August 2025, S&P Global assigned Sky Protocol a B- issuer credit rating, the first full agency rating for a DeFi protocol. B- is a speculative grade, so read it as a transparency signal rather than a safety badge.

Sky also offers stUSDS, an expert-tier token that takes on real risk, including a possible haircut, for a higher return; it sits above sUSDS on the risk curve and is not a default. The Sky Savings Rate is variable and can change, so check it at the source before you act.

Red flags to watch for

The clearest warning signs are easy to spot once you know them, and any one of them should slow you down.

• A headline APY far above the market band. Terra’s Anchor protocol advertised about 20% and held most circulating UST before it erased tens of billions of dollars in days in May 2022.
• Yield funded by token emissions. Strip out the incentive token and see what return is left.
• No audits and no operating history. Untested code is risk you cannot measure.
• A custodial setup with no transparency. If you cannot see the backing and you cannot withdraw on demand, you are trusting a balance sheet you will never read.
• Any promise of guaranteed or risk-free returns. That language is itself the red flag.

So, is stablecoin yield safe?

Stablecoin yield is safe enough to be worth it only when you can name what is paying you and verify it, and reckless when you cannot.

Here is what I would do: keep custody, read the backing before the rate, and prefer a governance-set rate I can watch onchain over a higher headline number whose engine I cannot explain. The extra percent or two is rarely worth the strategy you cannot see.

If you want to start at the lower-risk end, converting USDC to USDS and holding sUSDS is a sensible first position, and curated Sky Vaults or a Fixed Yield maturity are there if you want a different shape of return.

Whatever you choose, check the live rate and the collateral first, then size the position to the risk you can actually name.

Frequently asked questions

Is stablecoin yield safe? It is not risk-free, and safety depends on the yield source, the smart-contract code, who holds your funds, and how the rate is set. The risk ranges from modest to severe, so the right move is to check before you earn rather than assume.

What are the risks of earning yield on stablecoins? Five main ones: yield-source risk, smart-contract risk, custody and counterparty risk, rate volatility, and a depeg in the underlying coin. They are risks of the earning activity, separate from whether the coin holds its dollar.

What is smart contract risk? It is the risk that the code running a yield product fails or is exploited and you lose funds. Audits, years in production, and a clean exploit record reduce it, but they never remove it entirely.

How can I earn yield on stablecoins more safely? Run the five checks: confirm the yield comes from real revenue, confirm the code is audited and time-tested, keep custody, prefer a predictable governance-set rate, and verify the backing onchain. A beginner-friendly walkthrough of the steps is here.

What makes a stablecoin yield predictable? A rate set by governance that moves in deliberate steps, rather than one driven by minute-to-minute borrowing demand or a promotional budget that can be cut. A predictable rate can still change, since governance sets it.

What is the safest stablecoin yield? No stablecoin yield is risk-free, so judge by traits rather than labels. Lower-risk options tend to share the same profile: yield from real revenue, audited and time-tested code, non-custodial control, a governance-set rate, and backing you can verify onchain.

Is sUSDS safe and non-custodial? sUSDS is non-custodial, audited, diversified, and governance-set, which makes it lower-risk and predictable rather than risk-free. The Sky Savings Rate can change, smart-contract risk applies, and USDS is soft-pegged, so verify the current rate and collateral at financial.skyeco.com before committing.

Is a higher APY always riskier? Above the market band, usually yes, because the extra return has to come from somewhere. Terra’s near-20% and Stream’s double-digit loop both looked stable until the funding behind them failed.

Is Earning Yield on Stablecoins Safe? What to Check First (2026) was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Europe has built a serious rulebook. But on adoption, scale, and influence, the dollar system is still ahead.

Europe is not losing the stablecoin debate because it lacks regulation.

It is losing because regulation is not the same thing as adoption.

That is the uncomfortable truth behind the current stablecoin conversation in Europe: the region has built some of the strongest rules in the world, but the market is still moving toward dollar liquidity, dollar rails, and dollar-denominated digital money.

Christine Lagarde put it bluntly. The case for euro-denominated stablecoins, she said, is “far weaker than it appears.” Isabel Schnabel went further, warning that rising use of stablecoins could “cement the dollar’s global dominance.”

Those are not casual remarks. They are signals. And they tell us that the real debate is no longer about whether stablecoins matter. It is about who gets to shape the future payment stack and which currency becomes its default unit of account.

Europe is strong on policy seriousness. It is trying to preserve the euro’s role before digital dollarisation becomes entrenched.

Europe is winning the rules

On regulation, Europe is ahead.

MiCAR provides the EU with a formal framework for issuance, reserves, authorisation, disclosure, and supervision. That matters because it removes ambiguity and creates a legal perimeter for digital assets. For banks, payment firms, and institutions, this is not a minor detail. It is the difference between cautious experimentation and credible participation.

The European Central Bank is also pushing the digital euro as a strategic answer to Europe’s dependency on non-European payment infrastructure. Reuters reported that the European Parliament backed the digital euro in June 2026, and ECB officials have indicated that 2029 is a realistic launch horizon.

So yes, Europe is doing something serious. It is building the scaffolding for monetary sovereignty. It is not ignoring the future of money. It is trying to govern it before the market governs Europe instead.

Europe is losing the market

But policy strength does not automatically translate into market power.

The ECB has warned that rising stablecoin use could reinforce dollar dominance, weaken some countries’ ability to set monetary policy, and reduce the euro’s influence. Schnabel’s warning is especially important because it frames stablecoins not as a niche crypto issue, but as a structural monetary one.

The numbers tell the same story.

Reuters has reported global stablecoin issuance at nearly USD 300 billion, while euro-denominated stablecoins totalled only about USD 620 million. In another ECB-related context, Reuters cited euro stablecoins at roughly EUR 395 million.

That is not an ecosystem on the brink of global dominance. It is a gap. And gaps matter, because network effects compound. The currency that becomes the default for cross-border settlement, treasury flows, and tokenised finance tends to remain so.

This is why the sovereignty argument is so important. Europe is not trying to “win” stablecoins in the same way a startup wins product-market fit. It is trying to prevent USD stablecoins from becoming the invisible default inside European commerce. That is a defensive strategy, not an offensive one.

Europe is not building the dominant stablecoin market. It is trying to avoid becoming a captive market for someone else’s currency rails.

Why Lagarde is sceptical

Lagarde’s scepticism is not just ideological. It is rooted in how stablecoins behave under stress.

In her speech, she said stablecoins are vulnerable to runs and that their trade-offs outweigh the short-term benefits they might bring in financing conditions and global reach. She also argued that they are not the right tool for strengthening the euro’s international role.

That is a subtle but important point. The ECB is not saying tokenisation is bad. It is saying that settlement should not depend on a privately issued instrument that can lose its peg under pressure. In other words, the ECB distinguishes between the technology and the asset. It wants the technology, but it does not trust the cash leg.

Lagarde has instead pointed toward tokenised commercial bank deposits as a safer alternative. That tells us something important: Europe’s preferred path is not to expand stablecoins at any cost. It is to preserve the euro's monetary function while allowing digital innovation in forms the ECB considers more stable.

The UK is taking a different path

The UK is moving with a more enabling posture.

The Bank of England recently softened its stablecoin rules, dropped proposed individual holding caps, set a GBP 40 billion issuance limit per stablecoin, and raised the reserve allocation to short-term government debt.

That may still be cautious, but it is clearly more market-oriented than Europe’s position. The UK is essentially saying: let stablecoins prove their value under supervision, and then manage the risk. Europe is saying: contain the risk first, and only then decide how much room the market gets.

For founders and CEOs, that difference is not academic. It affects where innovation happens first, where capital feels more comfortable, and where product teams can move faster without running into a wall of regulatory resistance.

The UK is more willing to let the market test scale. Europe is more determined to protect the perimeter.

What Europe still needs to prove

Europe does not have a vision problem. It has a conversion problem.

There is no shortage of policy awareness or concern about dollar dominance. What is missing is a euro-native product layer with enough liquidity, adoption, and utility to compete with the existing USD ecosystem. Bank-led euro stablecoin projects are a step in that direction, but they are still catch-up moves.

This is where the strategic reality becomes uncomfortable. Europe may have the strongest regulatory architecture, but that strength does not matter if users, treasuries, merchants, and developers continue to default elsewhere. Regulation can defend a market. It cannot create one.

That is the tension at the heart of monetary sovereignty. It is not about whether Europe has rules. It does. It is about whether those rules will be enough to keep the euro relevant in a world where digital money is becoming programmable, composable, and borderless.

What founders should take from this

If you are building in fintech, payments, or crypto, this debate is not theoretical.

The next phase of digital money will not be decided by ideology. It will be decided by who can combine compliance, liquidity, and utility at scale.

That means the winners will be the firms that understand reserve design, redemption trust, distribution, and the regulatory logic of each market. In Europe, the challenge is not just to launch a product. It is to launch a product that can survive scrutiny, earn trust, and still attract users at scale.

And that is why this topic matters beyond policy circles. It is a question of competitiveness. It is a question of architecture. It is a question of whether Europe wants to be a builder of digital money or simply the best-regulated place to consume it.

The real test ahead

Europe is not failing because it lacks vision. It is failing because regulation is not enough to create market momentum.

The ECB is right to worry about dollar stablecoins becoming embedded in European commerce. But concern alone will not produce a dominant euro stablecoin. That requires product, liquidity, distribution, and user behaviour. On those dimensions, Europe is still behind.

So the real stablecoin debate in Europe is not whether to regulate the future.

It is a question of whether Europe still knows how to build one.reuters+2

Europe is winning on rules, but losing on market momentum.

About the Author

Joseph Zammit is a CMO and CSO in fintech and crypto with 25+ years at the intersection of marketing, strategy, and regulation. He helped design Malta’s pioneering DLT framework, launched the country’s first neobank, and led global expansion for crypto and Web3 platforms, turning complex regulatory and market conditions into clear go‑to‑market decisions. He is a member of the Crypto Valley Association.

The Real Stablecoin Debate in Europe Is About Monetary Sovereignty was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Europe has spent years building the rulebook. Today is the day we find out whether that rulebook becomes market power.

Today, MiCA becomes the reality that Europe’s crypto market has been waiting for. The transition period ends, and with it ends the idea that regulatory ambiguity can be a sustainable operating model for crypto-asset service providers serving EU clients. That may sound like a compliance headline. It is actually a market-structure event.

The real question is not whether MiCA matters. It does. The real question is what it changes in practice. My view is simple: MiCA is not just about crypto regulation. It is about which firms can survive in Europe, which payment models can scale, and whether Europe can defend monetary sovereignty in a world where stablecoins are becoming part of the financial plumbing.

I have spent more than 25 years at the intersection of financial services, regulation, and growth. I helped shape Malta’s DLT framework. I launched Moneybase, Malta’s first neobank. And I have spent enough time building at the boundary between innovation and regulation to know this: a legal framework only becomes an advantage when serious operators turn it into execution.

That is what MiCA now demands.

The market reset

ESMA has been explicit that the MiCA transitional period expires on 1 July 2026, and after that date, any entity providing crypto-asset services to EU clients without authorisation will be in breach of EU law. There is no real grace period left in the market. Firms either have the right permissions, the right structure, and the right operating model, or they will be forced into an orderly wind-down, relocation, or exit.

That is why the most important impact of MiCA will not be symbolic. It will be structural. The market is being sorted into licensed platforms, compliant partnerships, and everyone else. In a region where many firms grew up in the era of regulatory arbitrage, that distinction is now becoming decisive.

The numbers point to a meaningful consolidation. Recent reporting suggests that only around 194 to 210 firms have secured MiCA CASP licenses, while Europe previously had well over 1,200 registered VASP entities and roughly 3,000 platforms active in 2024. That means the market is not just getting cleaner; it is getting smaller, more selective, and far more expensive to operate in.

For founders, that changes the game. The winners will not simply be the fastest-growing platforms. They will be the ones who can combine licensing, governance, treasury discipline, distribution, and trust into a single operating model.

Why stablecoins are the real fight

This is where the story becomes bigger than crypto.

Christine Lagarde has been unusually direct on this point. In her May speech, she noted that stablecoins have grown from less than USD 10 billion six years ago to more than USD 300 billion today and are overwhelmingly denominated in US dollars. She also warned that nearly 90% of the market is controlled by Tether and Circle.

Her core warning is not about hype. It is about sovereignty. The growing argument in Europe, she said, is that the region must respond with euro-denominated stablecoins or risk digital dollarisation and a loss of monetary sovereignty. That is the line that should matter to anyone building in fintech, payments, or digital assets.

But the ECB’s position is more nuanced than a simple “Europe needs more euro stablecoins” thesis. Lagarde has argued that the case for promoting euro-denominated stablecoins is weaker than it appears if the debate is reduced to technology rather than settlement architecture. In other words, the issue is not whether tokenisation is useful. It is whether Europe is building the right public infrastructure to ensure that digital markets continue to settle in trusted money under European control.

That is the real strategic debate.

Europe vs US

The contrast with the United States is obvious. The White House has signalled a more expansionary approach, directing regulators to review barriers that prevent fintech firms from partnering with regulated institutions and asking the Federal Reserve to assess direct access to Reserve Bank payment accounts for some non-bank firms involved in digital assets. The strategic message is clear: the US wants to pull innovation closer to the core of the financial system.

Europe is moving differently. MiCA gives the market clarity, consistency, and a harmonised regulatory perimeter. That is a strength. But Europe’s caution also poses a risk: it may end up with the best-regulated digital asset market without necessarily winning the battle for liquidity, distribution, or monetary influence.

This is why the debate over euro stablecoins should not be treated as a niche policy discussion. It is a broader question of whether Europe is content to regulate digital money or intends to shape it.

The neobank signal

If you want to see where the future may be heading, look at Deblock.

Deblock is an on-chain banking platform that combines euro current accounts with non-custodial crypto wallets. It is a compelling model because it does not force the user to choose between traditional finance and digital assets. It lets both coexist in one experience.

That matters because the next generation of European financial products will not be judged only by whether they are licensed. They will be judged by whether they feel seamless, useful, and credible across fiat and digital rails. The strongest models will not look like crypto apps bolted onto banks. They will look like modern financial operating systems that connect accounts, cards, wallets, and tokenised assets within a single user journey.

That is why Deblock feels important. It hints at a future in which regulated banking and self-custody are no longer separate categories but complementary layers within the same product architecture.

What Europe must prove

Europe has won the argument that crypto needs rules. It has also made a serious move to contain stablecoin risk inside a regulated framework. But a rulebook is not a strategy by itself.

The harder part is what comes next: can Europe convert regulation into infrastructure, liquidity, and products that users and businesses actually adopt? Can it build a digital money stack that is competitive, not merely compliant? Can it support firms that are capable of scaling across borders without forcing them into the grey zone first?

That is where I would place the strategic warning.

MiCA will reward serious operators. It will also expose everyone who built on delay, ambiguity, or the assumption that Europe would not fully enforce the perimeter. The firms that survive will be those that understand compliance is not the opposite of growth. In the next phase of European digital finance, compliance is the price of admission to growth.

Europe now has the rulebook. The question is whether it can still win the market.

About the Author

Joseph Zammit is a CMO and CSO in fintech and crypto with 25+ years at the intersection of marketing, strategy, and regulation. He helped design Malta’s pioneering DLT framework, launched the country’s first neobank, and led global expansion for crypto and Web3 platforms, turning complex regulatory and market conditions into clear go‑to‑market decisions. He is a member of the Crypto Valley Association.

MiCA Is Now Live. The Stablecoin Fight Is About Monetary Sovereignty. was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why programmable rails are quietly replacing the plumbing of global finance

TL;DR

• Stablecoins aren’t a crypto side-bet anymore they’re emerging as core payments and settlement infrastructure, with 2024 transaction volume estimates ranging from $15.6 trillion to as high as $35 trillion depending on methodology.
• The real shift isn’t “dollars on a blockchain.” It’s that messaging, reconciliation, and settlement three separate processes in traditional finance can now happen on a single programmable system.
• Tokenized finance extends the same logic to bonds, deposits, and fund shares, with central banks (via BIS-led initiatives like Project Agorá) actively piloting unified ledger models.
• The biggest risk isn’t volatility it’s monetary. The BIS has flagged “stablecoin dollarisation” and the erosion of the singleness of money as structural threats to bank deposits and lending capacity.
• Contrary to popular narrative, the long-term winners may not be the largest private stablecoins (USDT, USDC) but regulated tokenized deposits issued by banks themselves.
• A meaningful share of reported stablecoin volume is inflated by trading and bot activity actual real-economy payment usage is smaller, but growing from a more legitimate base.

Opening Hook

In 2024, a small remittance company processing payments between the UK and Lagos noticed something odd in its ledger. A transaction that used to take three days to settle through a chain of correspondent banks, each taking a cut and adding a delay was now clearing in under a minute. No SWIFT message. No batch cutoff. No reconciliation team manually matching line items the next morning.

The money hadn’t gotten faster because the banks got better. It had gotten faster because it stopped being “bank money” for a few seconds. It became a token moved, verified, and settled on a programmable ledger before becoming spendable cash again on the other end.

That small, almost invisible substitution is the entire stablecoin and tokenization story in miniature. It’s not about replacing currency. It’s about replacing the rails currency travels on.

Context & Problem

Traditional finance runs on infrastructure built for a pre-internet world. Money moves through fragmented ledgers held by different banks, each updated on its own schedule, often only during business hours, often only after a batch process runs overnight. Cross-border payments are worse: they pass through a chain of correspondent banks, each one a separate ledger, each one a separate point of delay, cost, and potential failure.

This isn’t a minor inefficiency it’s the default condition of global finance. A wire from Singapore to São Paulo might pass through three or four intermediary banks before it lands, with fees and delays compounding at every hop. Securities settlement has its own version of the same problem: trades, custody records, and cash movements are tracked on separate systems that have to be reconciled after the fact, which is why settlement still routinely takes one to two business days even for liquid public securities.

Stablecoins and tokenized assets attack this problem at the structural level. Instead of multiple parties maintaining separate records that need to be reconciled, everyone references the same programmable ledger. The Bank for International Settlements has been explicit about this framing, describing the appeal of a “tokenised unified ledger” as a way to integrate messaging, reconciliation, and settlement into one system rather than three.

System Breakdown

It helps to separate the two ideas, because they solve overlapping but distinct problems.

Stablecoins are digital tokens engineered to hold a stable value, typically pegged to a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar. A basic transaction flow looks like this: a user acquires tokens from an issuer or exchange, holds them in a digital wallet, sends them across a blockchain network, and the recipient sees near-instant settlement. Behind the scenes, the issuer maintains reserves cash, short-term government securities, or similar low-risk assets and handles redemption when someone wants to convert tokens back into traditional currency.

Tokenized finance applies the same logic to a broader category of assets: deposits, bonds, fund shares, even real estate or trade receivables. An asset is issued on-chain, ownership and transfer rules are embedded directly into smart contracts, and settlement can be automated using delivery-versus-payment logic meaning the asset and the cash move simultaneously, atomically, with no gap where one party could be left holding a partial trade.

The distinction matters because stablecoins solve a payments problem, while tokenization solves a capital-markets and asset-ownership problem. Together, they form a stack: programmable money (stablecoins) moving programmable assets (tokenized securities) on the same underlying rails.

Deep Dive

The mechanics are simpler than the hype suggests, but the implications are larger than most people assume.

Take a tokenized money market fund. In the old model, an investor’s fund shares are recorded by a transfer agent, custody is handled by a separate custodian, and if the investor wants to use those shares as collateral for a loan, that requires yet another set of agreements and reconciliations between institutions. In a tokenized model, the fund share is itself a digital asset. It can be transferred, pledged as collateral, or settled against payment instantly, because ownership and the rules governing it live in the same place as the transaction itself.

This is why major institutions have started running tokenized money-market funds and tokenized government bonds as proofs of concept not because tokenization makes the underlying asset more valuable, but because it makes the operational layer around that asset dramatically cheaper to run.

The same logic applies to cross-border payments, which is where Project Agorá comes in. This is a BIS-led collaboration involving seven central banks and 43 private-sector institutions, aimed specifically at testing whether a shared, tokenized infrastructure can make cross-border payments faster and cheaper without abandoning the regulatory and legal protections that come with central bank money. It’s a meaningful signal: this isn’t fringe crypto experimentation, it’s central banks asking whether programmable ledgers belong in the core of the financial system.

What’s easy to miss is that none of this requires “crypto” in the cultural sense most people imagine no speculative trading, no anonymous wallets, no volatility. The technology underneath stablecoins and tokenized assets is being deliberately separated from the speculative crypto market and re-applied as plumbing.

Key Metrics

The scale of stablecoin activity is large enough that the range of estimates itself tells a story. Reported transaction volume for 2024 ranges from about $15.6 trillion to $27.6 trillion, with some estimates reaching as high as $35 trillion, depending on the dataset and methodology used. That spread matters it reflects genuine disagreement about how much of this volume is real economic activity versus automated trading and bot-driven transfers.

On the supply side, one widely cited figure puts total stablecoin supply at roughly $214 billion, with active addresses climbing from 19.6 million to 30 million a 53% increase. That growth in active addresses is arguably a more honest signal of adoption than raw transaction volume, since it reflects more distinct users and wallets actually engaging with the system rather than high-frequency trading inflating the totals.

Risks

The operational risks are the ones people usually think about first: smart contract bugs, bridge failures between different blockchain networks, wallet compromises, and outright chain outages. These are real, and they’ve caused real losses in the broader crypto ecosystem.

But the more structurally important risk is monetary, and it’s the one regulators are most focused on. The BIS has warned that widespread stablecoin adoption can undermine what it calls the “singleness of money” the principle that a dollar should be a dollar regardless of which institution is holding it. If stablecoins issued by different private companies start trading at slightly different effective values, or if redemption isn’t always guaranteed at par, that principle breaks down. The BIS has also raised the possibility of “stablecoin dollarisation” in smaller economies, where local currency gets displaced by dollar-pegged tokens, potentially destabilizing local monetary policy.

There’s a banking-specific version of this risk too: if deposits move out of traditional banks and into stablecoins, banks lose a cheap and stable funding source, which directly affects their capacity to lend. This is one reason banks themselves are increasingly interested in issuing their own tokenized deposits rather than ceding the space to private stablecoin issuers.

Finally, there’s a compliance gap that’s easy to overlook. A 2023 BIS bulletin flagged the issue of bearer-style stablecoins crossing KYC boundaries — meaning tokens can circulate freely beyond the identity checks performed by the original issuer, since anyone can hold and transfer them without re-verification at each step.

Bull vs Bear Case

The bull case holds that stablecoins and tokenization represent the most significant change to financial infrastructure since electronic payments themselves. Settlement that used to take days now takes seconds. Reconciliation that used to require entire back-office teams becomes largely automatic. Cross-border payments, historically the most expensive and slowest part of the system, become a software problem rather than a correspondent-banking problem. In this view, the institutions that build compliant, well-governed tokenized rails early will own the next generation of financial infrastructure, the way Visa and Mastercard owned the card-payment rails of the last generation.

The bear case is that most of the current activity is not what it appears to be. A large share of reported transaction volume is inflated by automated trading rather than genuine payments or commerce. Tokenization doesn’t automatically create efficiency — without trusted issuers, shared technical standards, and clear legal finality (meaning a transaction, once settled, is truly final and can’t be reversed or disputed), tokenized assets just become faster versions of the same bottlenecks, dressed up in new technology. And the regulatory risk is real: a system built around private stablecoin issuers competing with central bank money is, almost by definition, a system regulators will eventually move to constrain.

Scenario Analysis

Base case: Regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits coexist, with banks issuing their own tokenized money alongside a smaller number of heavily regulated private stablecoin issuers. Cross-border payments and securities settlement gradually migrate to tokenized rails over the next five to ten years, largely invisible to end users.

Bull case: Central bank initiatives like Project Agorá succeed in building genuinely interoperable, bank-grade tokenized infrastructure. Settlement times across both payments and capital markets compress from days to seconds as the default, and tokenization becomes the standard operating layer for institutional finance, not a niche feature.

Bear case: Regulatory fragmentation across jurisdictions slows adoption, high-profile stablecoin failures or de-pegging events erode trust, and the technology gets pushed back into a crypto-native niche rather than becoming mainstream infrastructure similar to how some earlier fintech innovations stalled out after early hype.

What Most People Miss

The most common misconception is treating stablecoins as primarily a crypto-trading tool or a way to access dollars outside the traditional banking system. In practice, the more important and durable use case is as a payments and settlement primitive the boring, infrastructural layer that most users will never directly interact with, the same way most people don’t think about the ACH network when their paycheck deposits.

The second misconception is assuming tokenization is inherently more efficient. It isn’t, by default. Efficiency only emerges when there are trusted issuers, shared technical standards across platforms, and clear legal finality. Without those three things, tokenized assets can simply replicate the fragmentation of traditional finance, just on a blockchain instead of a mainframe.

The third, and perhaps most contrarian point, is this: the long-term winners may not be the stablecoins everyone already knows. USDT and USDC currently dominate issuance and transfer activity, which has shaped the public narrative that private stablecoins are the future. But the more durable infrastructure may end up being tokenized bank deposits money that retains the legal and regulatory protections of the traditional banking system while gaining the programmability of a blockchain. That’s a much less exciting headline, but it’s arguably the more likely long-term outcome.

Key Variables

A few factors will determine which scenario plays out. Regulatory clarity is the biggest one whether major jurisdictions converge on consistent rules for stablecoin reserves, redemption guarantees, and KYC requirements, or whether fragmented rules force issuers to operate differently in every market. Issuer trust and transparency matter just as much: whether reserve backing is independently verified and redemption is reliably honored at par, especially under stress.

Interoperability is the quieter but equally important variable whether tokenized assets and stablecoins on different blockchain networks can move seamlessly between each other, or whether the ecosystem fragments into incompatible silos the way early internet protocols once did. And finally, bank participation: whether traditional banks build their own tokenized deposit products fast enough to remain central to the system, or whether they cede ground to private issuers.

Strategic Impact

For fintechs and payment companies, this shift changes the competitive landscape. Companies that build compliant infrastructure around stablecoin settlement and tokenized assets early gain a structural cost advantage over those still routing payments through traditional correspondent banking chains. For banks, the strategic imperative is defensive and offensive at once: defend deposit bases by offering their own tokenized products, while also building the compliance and custody infrastructure that institutional clients will eventually demand.

For treasury teams and institutional investors, tokenized money-market funds and bonds offer a preview of what capital markets infrastructure could look like with near-instant settlement and built-in collateral mobility assets that can be pledged, transferred, or repurposed in real time rather than locked in multi-day settlement cycles.

For policymakers, the strategic question isn’t whether to allow this technology, but how to shape it before private issuers shape it for them. Initiatives like Project Agorá suggest central banks are choosing to participate directly rather than simply regulate from the outside.

Conclusion

The headline framing stablecoins as a crypto product has always undersold what’s actually happening. What’s underway is a re-architecting of the operational layer of finance: the messaging, reconciliation, and settlement processes that have run on fragmented, batch-based systems for decades are being consolidated onto programmable, shared infrastructure. The dollar isn’t being replaced. The pipes carrying it are.

Whether the eventual winners are private stablecoin issuers, bank-issued tokenized deposits, or some hybrid of both, the direction is consistent: finance is becoming software, and the institutions that understand this early banks, fintechs, and regulators alike will be the ones shaping how that software gets written.

Personal Note

What struck me most while researching this piece wasn’t the trillion-dollar volume figures it was how unglamorous the actual winning use case looks. Nobody gets excited about reconciliation. Nobody writes headlines about settlement finality. But that’s exactly where the real value is being created, quietly, in the parts of finance that were never designed to be fast in the first place. The most important infrastructure shifts rarely look exciting while they’re happening they just show up, years later, as the thing nobody remembers having to wait three days for.

The Shopify of Money: How Stablecoins and Tokenized Finance Are Becoming the New Settlement Layer was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• cNGN has processed roughly $145 million in trading volume and about 350,000 transactions since launching in 2025.
• Despite that growth, many Nigerian fintechs have not integrated the regulated naira stablecoin.
• Industry leaders argue the challenge isn’t regulation or technology — it’s economics, developer adoption, liquidity, and distribution.
• The story highlights the broader challenge facing local-currency stablecoins across Africa.

The Compliant Naira, cNGN for short, issued by WrappedCBDC under the African Stablecoin Consortium, launched in February 2025.

cNGN is a Nigerian stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the Nigerian Naira. It was issued under the 2025 Investments and Securities Act, which grants the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) authority over digital assets. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) retains oversight of payment systems.

For WrappedCBDC, the motivation behind creating cNGN was the difficulty Nigerians faced buying dollar-based stablecoins. The company also sought to address the loss of value incurred due to transaction fees when converting those stablecoins back to naira.

The cNGN is not the first digital asset foray tied to the Nigerian Naira. In October 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria launched the eNaira. While the latter is a state-issued digital currency, cNGN is privately managed and blockchain-native.

cNGN Has Activity, But Adoption Remains Narrow

cNGN has recorded nearly ₦200 billion (~$145 million) in total Traded Volume across approximately 350,000 onchain transactions as of writing.

These numbers make it one of Africa’s most active regulated local-currency stablecoin projects by transaction value. But the numbers tell only part of the story. The transaction count and the total number of holders, which is slightly over 5,300, suggest activity remains concentrated.

This concentration indicates that cNGN isn’t being used for widespread merchant payments, retail purchases, or remittances, indicating low adoption.

Transaction value and ecosystem adoption are distinct metrics, and on the second measure, cNGN still has ground to cover.

Why Fintechs Aren’t Integrating cNGN

Speaking at the 2nd Edition of the Crypto & DeFi Forum, Seun Langele, co-founder of Polytope Labs and former Ethereum developer, said cNGN’s biggest problem isn’t the technology.

cNGN has been live for over a year now; like, how many people are actually building applications on cNGN? How many fintechs have integrated it?

We can philosophize all we want on how we can become infrastructure builders. Still, if we operate in a culture that is distrustful of new technology, then that is not a welcoming environment for builders.

Harri Obi, Former Regional (Africa) Marketing Manager for Bitget and lead at SuperteamNG, shares similar sentiments.

For the few fintechs I’ve spoken to, the economics aren’t compelling enough. If they’re already settling via bank transfers or dollar stablecoins, adding another asset means engineering work, compliance reviews, treasury management, and liquidity provisioning.

Unless CNGN can significantly lower costs, improve settlement speed, or unlock new revenue, it’s hard to justify prioritizing it over existing infrastructure.

That economic calculus matters enormously in a sector already stretched thin. Every new payment rail a fintech integrates creates real costs. In a capital-tight market, spending that money requires justification.

One X user said, “We were looking to add cNGN for the new agricultural investment we pushed on our platform. After all the bottlenecks, we just went with direct bank transfers, because it wasn’t worth it.”

Seun Langele also believes that “cNGN is not without its issues, which primarily are low liquidity for cNGN/NGN.”

However, he “expects people to be enthusiastic and speculate on what it can become in its final form, not meet it with irrational skepticism whenever it’s brought up.”

The Real Problem Isn’t Technology — It’s Distribution

cNGN has the technology. It has the regulatory license. According to Harri Obi, what it lacks is the network of developers, merchants, and builders needed to make it indispensable.

Beyond fintechs and businesses, CNGN’s most important adoption drivers are developers, i.e blockchain ecosystems and developer communities. Yet I haven’t seen CNGN invest meaningfully in developer activations, technical workshops, or hackathons at scale.

Stablecoins need ecosystems, not just licenses. M-Pesa did not become dominant because of a government mandate or even its license. It grew because it solved a problem; M-Pesa made sending money cheaper and simpler than any alternative.

USDT and USDC did not achieve global reach through regulatory approval alone; they solved a distribution problem by becoming the default rails that developers and merchants actually built on.

cNGN needs the same. Where are the public APIs? The grant programs? The merchant integrations? The developer documentation that makes it easier to build with cNGN than without it? These are the building blocks of adoption, and right now, they remain underdeveloped.

The Competition Is Harder Than It Looks

cNGN is not competing in a vacuum. Domestically, it sits alongside a mature payments infrastructure.

Between 2022 and 2024, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc (NIBSS) Instant Payments Platform (NIP) saw a 120% rise in processed transactions, from N5 billion to N11 billion. This figure places Nigeria among the most active real-time payments markets in the world.

Moniepoint, PalmPay, OPay, and Flutterwave have already captured deep merchant and consumer loyalty across their respective infrastructures.

These Neobanks provided reliable transfers when traditional banks had unreliable apps and USSD. They provided free transfers and referral bonuses, lowering transaction costs. During Nigeria’s cash scarcity in 2023, its tech infrastructure didn’t collapse amid the surge in digital transactions.

Flutterwave solved the heavily fragmented African payment landscape and became a unicorn.

Internationally, the competitive picture is even steeper. Nigerians continue to choose USDT and USDC over cNGN. The IMF recently issued Nigeria a warning regarding the use of dollar-pegged stablecoins in the country.

According to a 2026 BVNK report, Nigeria leads the world in the adoption of a dollar-pegged stablecoin. 87% of respondents currently/recently held stablecoins, and 80% planned to acquire them.

Amongst the respondents, nearly 60% owned USDT and an estimated 48% held USDC. For many, these stablecoins protect them from currency depreciation, are much easier to access than cNGN, and make remittances cheaper.

Beyond that, USDT and USDC also carry years of liquidity, wallet support, exchange integrations, and developer tooling that cNGN cannot yet match.

This means cNGN isn’t creating a new market from scratch. It is trying to replace, or at minimum, compete with, deeply entrenched payment behavior on two fronts simultaneously.

What This Means for Africa’s Local Stablecoin Movement

cNGN’s challenge is not unique to Nigeria. Across the continent, countries are exploring the regulation of local-currency stablecoins.

ZARU, a stablecoin backed 1:1 to the Rand, launched in February 2026. Luno, Sanlam, EasyEquities, and Lesaka launched the project.

In May 2026, Tanzania greenlit its first stablecoin sandbox pilot to test nTZS, a stablecoin pegged to the Tanzanian shilling.

Kenya continues to refine its stablecoin regulatory framework. Each project will confront the same structural question: what comes after the license?

State-backed digital currency, eNaira, serves as a cautionary tale. Despite launching 2 years prior, by 2023, less than 1% of banking customers used the eNaira. Less than 2% of those who downloaded the eNaira wallet actually used it.

The eNaira accounts for less than 1% of total currency in circulation. The low adoption is attributed partly to low bank penetration rates and restrictions on how much retail users could hold. Regulatory approval, in that case, was never enough to drive real-world use.

Successful projects will need to prioritize problem-solving and ecosystem-building as urgently as they pursue regulatory approval.

Regulation Doesn’t Create Product-Market Fit

Africa’s recent wave of crypto regulation has focused heavily on licensing, compliance, and oversight, all of which are necessary. Despite the cNGN doing everything right, regulation-wise, one thing is clear: regulation cannot force adoption.

Stablecoin adoption is driven by the need for faster, cheaper remittances and by currency volatility. Dollar-pegged stablecoin activity in Nigeria saw a surge in recent years, driven by naira volatility, the same currency cNGN ties its value to.

For many users, a stablecoin tied to a volatile currency defeats the purpose of stablecoin use.

Beyond that, Seun Langele points out in a tweet that the adoption problem for cNGN is also a trust problem. Cryptocurrency is already met with skepticism by many; Langele points out that “a lot of people have told me that they don’t ‘trust’ cNGN.”

All of these factors, combined with the aforementioned barriers to entry, have restricted the adoption of cNGN by users and fintechs.

In Harri Obi’s words,

The problems of CNGN are multifaceted. I can write an entire book about it. I was only speaking [on] the fintech part, and every top founder I’ve spoken to about this has basically said cNGN is simply a solution looking for a problem.

The Need for Indispensable Infrastructure

For cNGN to expand, it needs clear economic incentives, developer engagement, enterprise integrations, merchant acceptance, and user demand.

Across Africa, the next phase of stablecoin growth will be won by those who become indispensable. Indispensable to developers, businesses, and payment providers looking for something better than what already exists.

cNGN is not there yet; it needs to prove its economic value.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on June 29, 2026.

Why Nigerian Fintechs Are Still Hesitant to Integrate cNGN Stablecoin was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.